Not everything we know or believe can be known or believed on the basis of other things we know or believe. The reason is because that would lead to an infinite regress, which is impossible for any mortal to complete. So there must be some items of knowledge or beliefs that sit at the foundation of our epistemology--things we just kind of see are true. They can be things like, "I'm thinking of the number three," which are incorrigible since one has direct and immediate access to the content of their own mental states, or it can be things like, "It's impossible for something to create itself since that would require it to exist before it existed," which we just have a rational intuition about. We can just see that it's true by thinking about it.
But not everything is obvious to everybody. While it might be obvious to everybody that 2 + 2 = 4, it may not be obvious to everybody that the interior angles of any triangle in flat Euclidean space add up to 180 degrees. Some people can see it more clearly than other people, maybe because they're just smarter, or their brains are more optimal or something. After all, it requires slightly more thought to see that 5 + 7 = 12 than it does to see that 2 + 2 = 4 even though they are equally necessary.
Since these kinds of truths can only be known by rational intuition, if two people have a disagreement about them, it's nearly impossible for them to argue with each other about it. The only way is to use illustrations and analogies to try to get the other person to "see" it. But that often fails.
I was thinking about that this morning in the context of the principle that "out of nothing, nothing comes." This principle, or something very much like it, pops up in various places throughout the history of philosophy and outside of philosophy, too. A few years ago, I read On the Nature of Things by Lucretius. Lucretius believed that it was impossible for anything to come into being out of nothing under any circumstances. Christians, like Jonathan Edwards and William Lane Craig, don't go that far. Instead, they think it's impossible for anything to spontaneously come into being out of nothing without a cause or reason. Lucretius didn't think it was even possible for something to to be caused to come into being out of nothing.
This morning, a guy on reddit said he thought it was logically impossible for something to come into being out of nothing, and since the impossibility is logical, and omnipotence doesn't include the ability to do the logically impossible, it follows that not even God could have brought the universe into being out of nothing. Kathleen King and Lynn Atwater made the same kind of argument in their video, "God is impossible: a final proof". Lucretius would probably have agreed with them.
When a person rationally "sees" something with absolute clarity, it may not be possible to persuade them otherwise. There are some things I see with absolute clarity. I can see with absolute clarity that if two claims contradict each other, they can't both be true at the same time and in the same sense. I had a philosophy teacher in college who disagreed with me, and there are lot of people who are smarter than me who think I'm wrong. But that doesn't shake my belief in the slightest. I just think they're nuts or blind or something. The fact that they can't see it doesn't undermine my belief in the law of non-contradiction any more than a blind person's lack of sight undermines my belief in color. There is probably nothing that could ever cause me to change my mind about the law of non-contradiction since I see the necessity of it with absolute clarity by the use of my rational intuition.
While it is clear to me that the impossibility of contradictory statements being true is a logical impossibility, it isn't clear to me that "something from nothing" is a logical impossibility. It strikes me as being more of a metaphysical impossibility. The reason is because while I can see no logical contradiction involved in the supposition that something comes into being out of nothing (whether caused or not), it still strikes me as being impossible for it to happen spontaneously without a cause or reason. It does not strike me as being impossible for an all-powerful God to bring something into being out of nothing, though. I don't see that it would involve God doing something that's logically impossible. It does strike me as being an unusual power, but not an impossible power. There was a time when I suspected we all create energy out of nothing with our minds, which was how I resolved the interaction problem in substance dualism. I'm not quite as persuaded by that as I used to be, though.
Jonathan Edwards and Bill Craig both use thought experiments to try to get their readers to see that it's impossible for something to spontaneously pop into being out of nothing. These thought experiments have limited value, though. Either they fail to awaken a person's rational intuitions, causing them to "see," or else they are less obvious than what they are meant to demonstrate, in which case they are useless. That's not to say they never work, though.
Once a person has exhausted whatever thought experiments can be made to cause another person's intuitions to rise to the surface, where can they go? There are three views on the question of creation ex-nihilo: (1) those who think it's absolutely impossible under any circumstances, (2) those who think it's possible with a cause, but impossible without a cause, and (3) those who think it's possible to happen spontaneously without a cause. It may be that these three groups are at an impasse since there is nothing they can really point to except their own rational intuitions which nobody has access to except the individuals themselves. So there may be nothing we can do but shrug our shoulders.
The fact that some arguments for God rest on premises that are known by intuition is both a strength and a weakness. It's a strength because the things we know by intuition are some of the most certain things it's possible to know. The law of non-contradiction is one of the most certain things we can know. We can know with absolute certainty that when we run up against a genuine contradiction that we have uncovered an error of some sort. The intuition that it's impossible for something to spontaneously pop into being uncaused out of nothing makes the Kalam cosmological argument nearly1 irrefutable for people who have this intuition. But for people who lack this intuition, the Kalam cosmological argument is easy to dismiss. And they can simply place the burden of proof on anybody who asserts it. Since nobody can meet that burden of proof, the denier is perfectly within their epistemic rights in rejecting the argument. That's the weakness in having an argument that rests on rational intuition.
NOTES
1. It can be refuted by attacking the second premise--that the universe came into being out of nothing.
No comments:
Post a Comment